It's kind of crazy how long it's been since martial arts was front and center on a prime-time TV show. Not since David Carradine and Kung Fu (and it's '90s spin-off) have we had a regular drama with strongly dedicated to showcasing lavishly gorgeous, thrilling scenes where human beings tear each other apart with their bear hands. And swords.
So in the age of peak TV, AMC's new series Into the Badlands hopes to stand apart with stunning, Hong Kong-inspired fight scenes and its unusual southern-fried post-apocalyptic setting. At the center of almost all of those post-apocalyptic fights stands star Daniel Wu, often surrounded by no less than a half dozen totally destroyed dudes.
Wu was born in California and later moved to Hong Kong to join that city's vibrant film industry. Today, he's insanely prolific, with nearly 60 films to his name across an eighteen-year career. While primarily working in Hong Kong cinema, the actor has been slowly working his way back to the U.S.—not only does he appear in Badlands, but he'll also star in Duncan Jones' adaptation of the wildly popular video game Warcraft. In Badlands, Wu plays Sunny, a clipper—deadly fighters who work as enforcers for plantation-owning Barons.
Bringing movie-quality martial arts to TV, however, is no small feat. According to Wu, most Hong Kong action movies contain three or four big fights, shot across six months of production. For Into the Badlands' six-episode first season, a dozen elaborate fight scenes had to be shot in four months. That's insane. To get a feel for how demanding it is to be the star of a martial arts TV show, we asked Daniel Wu all about his intense training regimen. Here's what he told us.
Realize that training for real martial arts is different than movie martial arts: "The two don't necessarily translate, especially if you're a prize fighter, you've fought all your life you've fought all these fights, and now you're trying to do a movie. You see that happen a lot, a lot of professional fighters don't necessarily make it so well into the movie world. You've gotta understand camera angles, camera movement — a kick that may not be very powerful may look very powerful from a certain angle. I'll come across that a lot when I'm working with other professional fighters. They'll say, 'But that's not a strong kick,' and I'm like, 'Look at the screen. Look at this particular angle. It looks crazy powerful, right?'
"I learned that too. I came from doing Wushu and other martial arts, and then I got into movies, and I had to learn that as well. the language of martial arts movie fighting. It's a different thing, it's a different kind of logic. For example, a boxer, or certain styles of martial artist, don't look good on screen because they're short and quick. And you need to be able to see that movement happening on screen. If it's short and quick, it may be really effective in real life, like a quick jab to the throat. But if the audience doesn't see it, doesn't feel that power, then it's useless.
"Obviously we have one of the greatest choreographers ever, Master Dee Dee, doing all the choreography, so he knows as well what looks good and what does not, so I put my trust in him. It's a combination of martial arts and dance; you're really painting a picture across the screen with your body, but instead of dancing and telling a beautiful story, you're doing something violent. And so you have to make sure that violence comes across well onscreen."
Get ready to marathon: "The cinematic quality comes down to the genius of our fight director, Stephen Fung, but the intensity, I mean, you can't really avoid it.So you've just gotta train yourself to get ready for those four months. It's not like—a pro fighter trains at a six- to eight-week camp for one fight, that's maybe, at the most, thirty minutes or forty minutes, and they're done! That one thing is over, and they can rest again.
"This is not like that. It's the marathon version of that, where you have to prepare yourself for a long run. I started training about six months out—I'd been keeping up with the martial arts all this time, two or three days a week—but it's a very different prospect, doing two or three days a week for a couple hours, vs. twelve hours a day for four months, six days a week. I had to build myself up to that."
Get swole: ""I started off with doing a lot of yoga, and running, and getting my strength and conditioning up. Running stadium stairs, doing jumps, all that kind of stuff. Building up everything, getting my joints stronger, getting the muscles stronger. About three months out, I wanted Sunny to be a bit bigger, so I bulked up a bit—eighteen pounds total. So I spent that third month lifting weights. I was still doing the other stuff, but also lifting weights and trying to get bigger, and then the final two months was intensive martial arts stuff. I learned a lot through that process. I learned I did some things wrong, and now I know what to do for next season. Like in the bulking-up process—I've avoided deadlifts my whole life, because I hate them. But I knew that it was a good way to bulk up, right? "
But not too swole: "So I was doing deadlifts, and I was doing really heavy deadlifting, and I realized, once I started my martial arts training, that that was wrong, because it killed my kicks. For most normal people, deadlifts stretch your hamstrings, but in my case, it tightened them, because I was already very flexible. So it had tightened them a whole lot, and I spent a whole month trying to undo what I did with the deadlifts."
Go to fight camp: "About six weeks out, we had our intensive fight camp with all the other actors—training them and getting them ready for the show. And so, during that period I worked on specific moves that we're going to use in the show, or that I thought would be good to use in the show, and I worked on things with the double swords that Sunny uses. I had a lot of weapons experience before, but not double swords, so I spent a lot of time working on that."
But remember, fighters need body fat: "I was trying to maintain a twelve to thirteen percent body fat ratio. You know, most dudes, when they're doing action movies, they get really bulked up and then they cut down their body fat to like, five or six percent, so they're really ripped. But, if you're fighting a lot, it will kill you, because you will have no energy to fight throughout the day. So you need a little bit of stored fat there, to be able to maintain that energy. So I kept myself to twelve or fifteen percent, and tried not to get too ripped. Because when you get really ripped, you not only don't have the fat to burn for energy, but you also get dehydrated really quickly. I wanted to make sure none of that happened to me while we were going on."
Eat. All the time: "I still had to work really hard to keep on the weight because you're doing, basically twelve hours of cardio all day long. Also, it's ninety-degree weather in New Orleans, in ninety percent humidity, wearing a leather trenchcoat! But basically I'm just fighting and fighting, right? So I had to eat maybe seven meals a day. Every two hours someone was shoving a meal in my face. Sometimes I would replace that with a shake or something, but most of it was trying to get real protein or real carbs in."
Work out even when your job is a workout: "While you're filming, you might wonder 'How do you maintain it?' You don't really need to maintain too much, because you're working every day on it. you're working twelve hours a day on it. So the only thing I really had to do was at the end of every other long day, I'd have to hit the gym and hit the weights, so after a twelve- or fourteen- or sixteen-hour day, I'd hit the gym for another hour, to maintain the muscle mass."